As I clearly see it, about the only major problem with the recently initialed “Enhanced” Military Cooperation Agreement between Ghana and the United States, is the abject lack of critical-thinking skills among the leadership of the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority, led by the infamous Legon plagiarist and Tamale-South Representative, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu. The fact of the matter is that if this compact goes ahead as scheduled, the Ghana Armed Forces could easily become the most formidable security apparatus for ensuring the political stability and level of cross-national security in the West African sub-region and well beyond.
For instance, it has taken a detachment of the United States’ Armed Forces to prevent Islamist jihadists, largely the Tuareg Arabs, from running roughshod and rampant and riotous over the entire nation of Mali. Consequently, having a strategically advantageous staging point in Ghana, in the very heart of the West African sub-region, with the symphonic collaboration of the Ghana Armed Forces, and security forces from some of the other ECOWAS member countries, could effectively facilitate the eradication of the fast-creeping wave of terrorism from the region. Even as I write, there have occurred bone-chilling terrorist acts in Burkina Faso, to the immediate north of Ghana, and in La Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast), to Ghana’s immediate West.
And so, really, short of a pathological lack of foresight and collective self-love, especially on the part of the NDC’s Parliamentary Minority, it is not clear to me precisely why we need US Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Robert P. Jackson, to literally tutor Ghanaians like a brood of wild-eyed kindergartners, to fully appreciate the enormous benefits that Ghanaians stand to gain from the establishment of an American Military Base (AMB) in our country (See “US Ambassador Say[s] Ghana Will Benefit from Defense Cooperation Agreement” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 3/22/18).
For starters, in a country where the general unemployment rate hovers around 50-60-percent, a considerable number of both temporary and permanent jobs are apt to be created. It is also quite likely that the size of the Ghana Armed Forces would exponentially expand, also opening up the job market. Inversely, the high rate of crime in the general population would dramatically decline, knowing fully well that there is a formidable force present on the ground to promptly intervene and stamp out such morally and economically regressive antisocial activities.
On the tax-free front, which is one of the sticking points of their vehement protestation against the Ghana-US’ “Enhanced” Security Compact, it makes perfect sense for import and export transactions executed by the American security operatives on the ground, in Ghana, to be made tax-free or tax-exempt, because even as the copy of the supposedly “secret” agreement that I have right here before me categorically states, whatever permanent structures put on the ground, and other movable and unmovable structures that the Americans so decide, shall become the bona fide property of the Ghana Armed Forces and/or the Government of Ghana, once the terms of the Agreement have been fulfilled or terminated and the Americans decide to leave our country.
This, of course, is far, far better than the “Judgment-Debt Scam” exploitative boondoggle to which the Rawlings Posse treated Ghanaians over the course of at least some 16 years, in which non-performing foreign companies were literally gifted billions of dollars in Ghanaian taxpayer funds, using devious legal technicalities, with the active complicity of commission-soliciting executive operatives in primarily regimes of the National Democratic Congress. Then also, the free use of whatever Radio Spectrum the Americans decide to appropriate, for purposes of telecommunications, also ought not to pose any problems for their Ghanaian hosts, so long as such appropriation does not severely and inordinately cut into local media use.
But, here again, it is rather preposterous for the Haruna Iddrisu Gang to presume to casually equate such American free spectrum use with tax-dodging commercial media operatives in the country. Besides, this is technology of whose invention and development the United States has literally been in the proverbial eye-of-the-storm. And, oh, I forgot to also add that state-of-the-art healthcare facilities are likely to be erected across the country in due course, thus auspiciously enabling the poor and destitute to have access to some of the same, where in the recent past, for example, it was only the filthy rich and powerful in Ghanaian society who could afford to fly abroad to access the same.
Ultimately, from what we learn, the United States has more than 62 Military Bases around the globe, including bases in such strategically prepossessing countries and global economic giants as Japan and Germany. And so, really, Ghana is only joining the good and plush company of nations deemed to be of militarily strategic and, one could aptly say, economic significance to the world’s greatest socioeconomic, cultural and political superpower. Could these embarrassingly self-absorbed moral and intellectual toddlers on the NDC’s side of the parliamentary aisle shove it, so the overwhelming majority of us forward-looking Ghanaian citizens can have some peace and quiet?
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